The history of F1 is mostly defined by breakthroughs: the paradigm shifts in the sport, where one team makes a major advancement, and everyone else has to react to keep up. One of the things I find weak in most F1 management games out there is that they don’t really have this: they mostly follow a pattern of starting with a highly detailed representation of the current season, and assuming a path of optimization into the indefinite future, with development mostly being improvement on what came before. To be fair, this is kind of how the sport is lately as well, with ridiculously prescriptive rules that effectively ban almost any form of creativity outside of finding and exploiting detailed loopholes.
Some of these major breakthroughs would be:
- Rear-engine layout
- Monocoque chassis
- Wings
- Ground effect
- The turbo era
- Carbon fibre
- Electronic driver aids
I want to find a way to include these “unicorn” technologies into my game, but in a compelling way. We of course know, with the perspective of history, that it was Lotus who pioneered wings. However, I want it to be possible for anyone – who has capable staff, and who dedicates research to the area – to be the first to make the breakthrough, that is to say that it can’t be scripted and must have variability.
At the same time, it can’t be too on-the-nose. If I offer you, as a human with real world historical knowledge, the option to start investigating ground effect in the mid 1970s, you have a huge unfair advantage because you know what happens next! There needs to be a degree of noise and imperfect information.
Many of the breakthroughs came through collaboration with people outside motorsport, such as John Barnard’s relationship with aerospace leading to the first use of carbon fibre. For every successful attempt though there were many that came to nothing. Sometimes that’s because an innovation is ahead of it’s time, and lacks the supporting ecosystem to make it work. Sometimes it’s just a dead end, or because of an unfavorable trade-off in some other aspect. Sometimes it’s because the innovation is too powerful, and is neutered or banned by regulations almost immediately.
I think what I might do to include this is to have some kind of seeded “deck” of outcomes when you do research. At a certain point in the timeline, the next unicorn starts to become find-able. You might find it immediately, but probably not. The more time passes, the weighting gets increased, to try and keep the timeline balanced. Imagine for example a virtual world where ground effect emerges before wings. Another way to do this might be to have a hidden technology tree, with dependencies, where the next unicorn can only be introduced once the prerequisites meet a certain level.
Equally, once a new unicorn emerges, there needs to be a compelling model for catching up. This normally meant reverse-engineering what other teams had been up to. Meanwhile just because you know what they did, and know how to copy it, doesn’t mean you can just bolt it on to the existing car without ruining the balance – integrating the new parts might need other changes to make things compatible.
I’m not entirely sure how to go about this yet, but I feel like getting this part right would be key to making the rest of the game feel right.